Festive 3-2

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Though she agreed, Eve shrugged. “Maybe she’s a slow burn. Let’s go check in with Morris, then we can start working on the clients. Maybe we can find out who he had in mind for the third member of his threesome.”

• • •

The white tunnel of the morgue smelled of a recent cleaning. Something that brushed lemons over death and left an undertone of industrial antiseptic.

Eve wondered if those who spent their days and nights working in its warrens even noticed.

She passed Vending’s bright and colorful lights, felt a low-level craving for more caffeine, nodded to one of the crew pushing a body bag on a gurney.

Not all the dead were hers, she thought, but in an odd way, they all belonged to Morris.

She found the chief medical examiner standing over her dead, a clear protective cape over Morris’s sharply elegant suit of forest green.

Two more bodies waited on steel slabs.

“You’ve got a backup,” she commented.

“Holidays. Some deck the halls, others opt to haunt them. An apparent suicide pact, but we’ll see.” He lowered his microgoggles, smiled. “A long day for you already. Can we offer you some refreshment? I have orange fizzies in the friggie.”

Peabody brightened. “Yeah?”

“I know my cops. Pepsi’s cold, Dallas.”

“Thanks. You look . . . cheerful.”

“I had a couple of days off, visited some old friends. It was good for me.”

“Nice.” And it was good to see him wearing color again, looking relaxed. In the months since he’d lost the woman he loved, the grief and strain had weighed visibly on him.

She cracked the tube Peabody brought her, took a swig of cold caffeine. “So. Ziegler, Trey. He won’t be decking any halls, either.”

“Blunt force trauma, tried and true.”

“Personal trainer of the year trophy.”

“Ah, the irony. Your vic was rather fiercely fit. Exceptional muscle tone, low body fat, no signs whatsoever he paid for body work. And I must say his skin’s wonderfully taut and smooth.”

“He loved himself, a lot.”

“He had a bunch of high-end products,” Peabody added. “Hair, body, skin. Some of it wasn’t even opened yet.” Her wistful sigh earned a hard stare from Eve. “It just seems like a waste, that’s all.”

“Yes. Striking here, on the left forehead, and the second on the back of the skull.”

He turned to his screen, brought up the view of the second wound, now cleaned. “While the first blow would have incapacitated — severe concussion, considerable bleeding, leaving the jagged gash you see here, the second, a down-blow of considerable force, fractured the skull, driving bone fragments into the brain. Death within minutes. The trophy had some weight, I’d say.”

“It had a figure on top,” Peabody added. “Ripped body.” She held out her arms, flexed.

“Of course,” Morris murmured, his exotic eyes amused as he added more data. “From the angles, the depth of the head wounds, the attack would have gone — probability ninety-six-point-eight percent — like this.”

On screen two figures faced. One gripped the trophy in both hands swung right to left, striking the other figure on the temple.